Slide 1

LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011Wardhaugh Ch 1Wardhaugh Ch 1

Discuss calendar, readings

Slide 2

LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011Wardhaugh Ch 1Wardhaugh Ch 1

Wardhaugh – Chapter 1

What is considered grammatical in a language?

The prescriptive vs. descriptive debate – what is it exactly?

Chomsky separates out performance from competence

Says linguists task is to examine competence, not performance

“Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogenous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammaticality irrelevant conditions such as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.” p. 3

Knowing how to use a language = communicative competence

Slide 3

LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011Wardhaugh Ch 1Wardhaugh Ch 1

Wardhaugh – Chapter 1

In an ideal speaker-listener homogenous speech community, there is no variation – people do not change their performance and performance matches competence 100%

However, there IS variation in language (as we will see shown again and again by socioling studies) – so should we as linguists just ignore variation and call it background noise?

NO! It is in the variation, the use of language, where we can truly examine linguistic competence – variation does have its limits as well as its social significance (production and perception/evaluation)

Slide 4

LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011Wardhaugh Ch 1Wardhaugh Ch 1

Wardhaugh – Chapter 1

The challenge for sociolinguists (and some would argue ALL linguists) is to explore the co-variation of linguistic items (Hudson) and social categories.

Linguistic items = ???

Social categories = ???

pronunciation, word choice, grammatical structures

identity, power, class, sex, region, politeness, status, solidarity, accommodation

Slide 5

LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011Wardhaugh Ch 1Wardhaugh Ch 1

Wardhaugh – Chapter 1

The interaction between language and society

1) Social structure influence or determine linguistic behavior = You speak the way you speak because of who you are

2) Linguistic structure/behavior determines social structure = Whorfian hypothesis (p. 230) – you see the world thru your language

3) Influence of lang and society is bi-directional

4) Social and linguistic structure are independent of each other = no relationship between the 2 (Chomsky again)

Slide 6

LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011Wardhaugh Ch 1Wardhaugh Ch 1

Wardhaugh – Chapter 1

Slide 7

LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011Wardhaugh Ch 1Wardhaugh Ch 1

Wardhaugh – Chapter 1

Different types of sociolinguistics

Chambers favors Variationist approaches (page 11)

Gumperz suggests that there is more than this – still doesn’t identify causality

There is a debate about what we can do with sociolinguistics and what we SHOULD be doing. See Cameron critique on p, 12

Slide 8

LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011Wardhaugh Ch 1Wardhaugh Ch 1

Wardhaugh – Chapter 1

Major topics in sociolinguistics: Language change, Variation, Boundary marker (symbolic function of language as a means of group formation), Multilingualism, including language contact; language conflict; Relativism (“linguistic relativity hypothesis”)

Applications of sociolinguistic research: education, particularly in multilingual situations; communication breakdowns in service situations, industry, legal profession, language planning and engineering

Slide 9

LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011Wardhaugh Ch 1Wardhaugh Ch 1

Wardhaugh – Chapter 1

Sociology of Language versus Sociolinguistics

Chambers 1995 (p. 11) notes that the sociology of language more concerned with the more purely social end of the continuum, while sociolinguistics with the more personal, although a great deal of overlap in the middle

Sociolinguistics (a.k.a. “micro-sociolinguistics”): The study of the relationships between language and society with the goal of understanding the structure of language. Typically looks at forms and uses of language on a small scale.

Sociology of language (a.k.a. “macro sociolinguistics”): The study of the relationships between language and society with the goal of understanding the structure of society. Often concerned with large-scale socio-political issues.

A divide between the two approaches – see p. 14 quote for a more unified understanding

Slide 10

LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011Wardhaugh Ch 1Wardhaugh Ch 1

Wardhaugh – Chapter 1

Fields of Sociolingusitics Ethnography of speaking (Hymes, anthropological orientation, participant observer) Variation studies (Labov, Trudgill, Chambers, quantification, linguistic orientation,

dialectology; Milroys and network analysis) Sociology of language (Fishman, social and political issues, macro-sociolinguistics,

domain analysis) Interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz; face-to-face encounters, anthropological and

psychological in orientation) Conversation analysis, ethnomethodologists (Schegloff, Sacks; sociologists, ethnic

structure) Discourse analysis (Tannen; large chunks of language, psychological and highly

interpretive) Social psychology (Giles; psychological, methodology highly experimental) Pragmatics (Austin, Grice, Searle; speech act theory)

Slide 11

LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011Wardhaugh Ch 1Wardhaugh Ch 1

Wardhaugh – Chapter 1

Sociolinguistics in all forms is generally data driven

Some of it is quantitative and statistical analysis used to show correlation between linguistics and social structures (usually variationist)

Slide 12

LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011Wardhaugh Ch 1Wardhaugh Ch 1

Wardhaugh – Chapter 1

Lets look at the list of Bell’s principles on pp. 18-19

Slide 13

LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011Wardhaugh Ch 1Wardhaugh Ch 1

Wardhaugh – Chapter 1

Lets look at the list of Bell’s principles on pp. 18-19

Slide 14

LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011LING 432-532 – Sociolinguistics – Spring 2011Wardhaugh Ch 1Wardhaugh Ch 1

Wardhaugh – Chapter 1

Particularly “the observer’s paradox” - how does Labov resolve this? Listen to NPR clip

William Labov - NYC